One reason I’d like to put some distance between my family and northeast Indiana? I have never — never in my life — seen public schools with such draconian, because-I-said-so, zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. I went to high school in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio and it might as well have been Berkeley.

Follow the link to this story: Kid writes a column for the school newspaper complaining about new rules. Calls the rule-makers “Fun Nazis.” For this infraction, the entire press run of the paper is confiscated and everyone is given a stern lecture. But! Showing the sort of scrappy perserverence that generally serves journalists well, the kid writes another column, and if you put the first letter of each paragraph together, it spells out “Fun Nazi.” Of course no one would have known if the kid hadn’t told a friend, who told a friend, who…you know what happened.

Well, this sort of subversion cannot stand: The principal was understandably unhappy that his instructions had been ignored and he asked Clint whether he thought it was funny.

Gillespie was suspended for the rest of the school year � only three days � but he was also told he couldn�t take part in the graduation ceremonies.

I thought it was funny, too. So’s the rest of the story.

Well, crap. I waited all day to write something, hoping to have a few snappy lines from today’s Jim Harrison reading/signing at Shaman Drum Bookshop, and then what happens? We arrive 10 minutes early but the crowd had already filled the half of the store where he was sitting, and the overspill in to the other half was big enough you couldn’t even get close enough to see him. Plus, he had already started.

So we went to Border’s. Bought two Judy Blume books and the first Narnia book for the household’s youngest reader. That’ll teach ’em.

You can read the Freep story about Harrison’s new book here. I think it makes a bit too much out of the question whether it’s the Michigan novel, but no harm done. The picture on the website is tiny, but it ran big in the paper, and it looks like Jim’s gout is acting up again. A cane? Maybe he’s getting over a knee injury or something.

So the day wasn’t a total waste, anyway. Raced into town early today to catch another History of War class. Today: Pearl Harbor, among other things. I was impressed the prof made it 100 minutes into a 120-minute class before he felt the need to sneer derisively at the movie of the same name, which shows some restraint, if you ask me.

With no famous man of letters to speak of, let me tell you instead about Kate’s school talent show last week, which I think I may have enjoyed nearly as much as the James Brown show Jones and I caught in Columbus back in ’82 or so. I remember my elementary school talent show; I told the teacher, “But I don’t have any talent,” and she said, “You can be the M.C.” So I was. If only I’d been born a little later, like now, when jumping rope in a pair of deely-bobbers is considered stageworthy. And you know what? It was.

Good riddance with the talent fascism of my youth, when you had to sing or dance or play the piano. Hail the talent show of today, with its crazed mix of acts — two kids demonstrating karate moves to the musical accompaniment of “Kung Fu Fighting;” a girl who spins the hula hoop for three minutes, alternating with spells of using it as a jump rope; girls on the cusp of middle school doing a booty dance to hip-hop; a Bow Wow singalong…oh, the head spins.

I could scarcely believe it. When I was a kid, I wouldn’t have appeared before an audience in anything other than a 60-member choir. But no one seemed embarrassed by anything — no one even got stage fright, or seemed to, anyway. Is this the sort of self-confidence that leads to plagues upon the land like “American Idol”? Maybe so. But as I always say: Where else can you get entertainment like this at these prices?

Well, it seems pretty obvious that the Associated Press is deeply, deeply into the enemy camp. Presenting, Other things Iraq funding can pay for.” Such as:

It could send 748,495 people, nearly everyone in Jacksonville, Fla., to Harvard University for four years. Based on Harvard’s 2004-05 school year costing $39,880 for tuition, fees, room and board, multiplied by four. Or send 2,806,506 people – almost all the residents of Chicago – to the average-priced public university for four years, based on The College Board calculation that the average public college and university costs $10,636 per year, multiplied by four.

Like they could even get INTO college!

I promise to keep this Annie Dillard portion of the post as brief as possible: This weekend we went to our lake cottage — and new readers, lest you think this is insufferable second-house-dropping, let me tell you that our lake cottage is truly cottage-like, the size of a two-car garage and lacking even a shower — and…where was I? OK, we went to the lake. I took the kayak into the Puddle in search of the swan nest I found last week. Only the swans were off the nest, and next to them were two wee baby swans. Cygnets, they’re called.

I regret I didn’t get close enough for anything other than some highly pixelated photos of what the guidebooks call “threat posture,” but I did bring the binoculars, so I retreated a bit and watched them through those. I discovered why the cygnets seemed to be there and then not there — when they feel unsafe, they climb up on mom’s back, who holds her wings in arched position to hide them. Watching them scramble up there with their teeny black feet? God, it’s so cute makes your teeth hurt. Here are some much better pictures of the phenomenon than I could ever get.

Moving on…you might have to be a total blog nerd to get this, but I really liked the Poor Man’s Tech Central Station parody, especially the “director’s coke binge” line. But then, I really like the Poor Man, too.

I used to give Rush Limbaugh the benefit of the doubt, assuming all that blathering about how great he is is just the usual cover for the sort of deeply insecure, self-loathing, obese-on-the-inside jerk you find all over the radio business. I dunno, though — maybe he really is nuts:

You’re getting criticized for comparing the prison abuse in Iraq with a college prank. Were you misinterpreted?

I was totally misinterpreted and taken out of context. In a three-hour show, I would wager that two hours and 58 minutes were spent discussing the aspects of those photos that repulsed everybody, including me. The point I made was that this is not worth demeaning our entire war effort. And I think that these photos have been used as a political opportunity here by opponents and enemies of the President to discount the entire war in Iraq.

Maybe not nuts. Just high.

Finally, Wonkette takes on Michelle Malkin. And wins.

Life’s milestones arrive when you least expect it. Chalk up last Friday as one for me: First opportunity to search for one’s own name in a book index My former colleague Robin Yocum published his memoir of life on the Columbus Dispatch police beat, “Dead Before Deadline.”

If you follow the link, don’t believe that scowling boolsheet picture on the cover, a big fat set-up taken, like, the day before yesterday. The real Robin is in his authorial mugshot — Mr. Smiley, Mr. Forelock-tugger, the face that opened a thousand doors in neighborhoods crappy and otherwise, where daddy or mama or someone’s son or daughter had been gunned down, run down, or beaten/stabbed/thrown out a window. For, as Robin points out more than once, on the Dispatch cop beat you not only wrote the story about the mayhem, you then had to knock on the loved ones’ doors and ask them to tell the readers everything about the unlucky — but not always undeserving — deceased. Under night city editor Bernie Karsko, no juicy cop shop story failed to warrant at least one more follow-up. The first follow is always the grieving relatives, and I’m grateful Robin gave away one of the oldest tricks in the book: When you do the grieving-relatives story, ask for a picture of the deceased. When they bring out a great handful of them, ask to take them all, so “the photo editor” can choose the best one. It’s really a trick to make sure the TV yo-yos don’t get any. It’s the sort of thing you have to keep in mind when you’re getting the details, but to me, it illustrates the essential duality of reporting — half sympathetic ear, half coyote trickster.

I found what I expected to find — a lot of people who bugged me then presented as charming characters now — and a lot I didn’t. I’d forgotten a lot of the cases he wrote about, but they came back to me. Linda Marsick, who strangled herself, slowly and horribly, out of grief over the death of Elvis Presley; Jean Shrader, who was probably killed by her husband but proving it was beyond the capabilities of the law and order people; Janice and Brandon Beidleman, mother and baby, beaten and raped and strangled and smothered, another bad day for the prosecutor’s office. Dr. Jackson. Laura Carter.

Laura Carter was maybe 19 or so, a freshman at Denison University, a preppie private college east of Columbus. It was Parents Weekend, and hers were in town from Philly or somewhere like that, and they’re driving into Columbus to eat dinner at a nice restaurant. Down East Broad Street they come, Laura and her parents and a couple friends. Laura’s in back, and she’s leaning forward talking to her parents in the front seat, her arm up on the seat. Which leaves her ribcage exposed when, a block away, some men open fire in a drug dispute. The bullet hits her under her arm and tears through all the important blood vessels in her chest. They were only a couple blocks from the hospital, her father had the presence of mind to follow the signs and drive right to it, but it didn’t do any good. She was effectively D.O.A.

From Robin’s book:

Nancy Nall and I tag-teamed the story. We wrote: As the group drove west on E. Broad St. near East High School, an argument involving four men but a world apart from the car yet only a block away, exploded into violence. With the sudden ring of gunfire, the two groups were drawn tragically together.

I read this, and all I could think was: Good God, did I write this shit?

See, this is what I mean. Part of me was stunned anew by the simple narrative. Think of what it was like inside that car — one minute you’re going to dinner with your daughter and her friends and the next, she’s slumped over and everyone is screaming and there’s blood and a shattered window and you’re in an unfamiliar city and what do you do? Whatdoyoudowhatdoyoudowhatdoyoudo? It shortens your breath. And my 25-year-old self came up with “ring of gunfire” and “drawn tragically together.” And here I am 20 years later, and I’m bothered by my crappy prose. Not as much as by the crime itself, I suppose.

Hey! Personal growth!

Coyote trickster footnote: Laura Carter’s college roommate was Christopher Cross’s girlfriend. She ended up the inspiration for a Christopher Cross song. You make of that what you will.

What Robin didn’t tell you: When he needed something from someone — an interview, mainly — he was an absolutely devastating pleader. He was like Puss-n-Boots in “Shrek 2” when he gets the big eyes. He’d tell people he was on the brink of losing his job, that he had a wife and baby and they’d all be thrown out on the street. It was quite something. But it nearly always worked.

If he were here today, he’d be making the big eyes: “Please, buy my book.”

I saw “Independence Day” the summer it came out, although not right away. I had to be sucked in by the hype and by the (generally) good word-of-mouth, fool that I am. I tried to relax into the spirit of no-IQ Hollywood fun, but I discovered, not for the first time, that there’s a threshold to my suspension of disbelief, and perhaps it’s located at the point where we’re asked to believe average people can fly F-15 fighter jets after half an hour of training.

I was so mystified by this moronic film’s popularity that I dashed off a column saying, in effect, what the hell? For the newspaper equivalent of a summer movie, the column’s impact amazed me. I got tons of mail and phone calls from other disappointed moviegoers. My favorite single comment came from a total stranger, who pulled his car to the side of the road when he saw me walking down a sidewalk in downtown Fort Wayne, rolled down his window and shouted, “I thought that movie sucked too!”

This weekend greets yet another preposterous disaster film from the same director, The Day After Tomorrow, and early reviews say it’s more of the same. Actually, movies like this aren’t so bad, because the pans are fun to read. My old screenwriting prof Terry gets a joke in his very first paragraph: We first meet Jack Hall, the dashing climatologist hero — three words I never thought I’d string together — of the eco-disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow”…

The two-star review goes on to point out groaner after groaner — About all that smells real is the White House discovering that Los Angeles is being leveled by multiple tornadoes: “Quick, turn on the Weather Channel,” yells some policy wonk … — and maybe it’s good that they are groaners, to minimize the chance anyone might take it seriously, to assume that global warming can cause, within days, melting polar ice caps followed by a new ice age.

But who knows? Last spring, when Arthur Miller came to Ann Arbor, he threw out an aside, that because of global warming the U.K. is “within five years” of a crippling wave of ice-agey weather that will make life there impossible. I looked at Alan and said, “He’s an old man.” Just to be safe, though, I told our BBC fellow to buy a good parka at the end-of-season sales.

Or whoever that guy is who wrote that thing circulating around the internet, about how much everyone in Iraq really loves us and 400,000 people have water or immunizations or whatever.

Damn AP reporters. Traitors:

FALLUJAH, Iraq — With U.S. Marines gone and central government authority virtually nonexistent, Fallujah resembles an Islamic mini-state — anyone caught selling alcohol is flogged and paraded in the city. Men are encouraged to grow beards and barbers are warned against giving “Western” hair cuts.

“After all the blood that was shed, and the lives that were lost, we shall only accept God’s law in Fallujah,” said cleric Abdul-Qader al-Aloussi, offering a glimpse of what a future Iraq may look like as the U.S.-led occupation draws to a close. “We must capitalize on our victory over the Americans and implement Islamic sharia laws.”

Richard Cohen read the same story. Yeah, well he’s a traitor too!

Indiana National Bank asked Tony Hulman to share Indianapolis 500 attendance figures when he borrowed an estimated $700,000 to purchase Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1945.

Last fall, The Star decided to solve the mystery.

Come on, you know you’re going to read the rest, don’t you?

I posted the item below from an Ann Arbor coffeehouse, wi-fi-ing from my Apple PowerBook. I was interrupted in the midst of putting it together by a call on my cell phone. A man glanced my way as I talked, and I know he was thinking what I was thinking:

God, are you insufferable.

And God, was I ever. But I can’t help it. I overstayed the time necessary to eat a piece of stale crumb cake and drink an overpriced cup of coffee. It wasn’t the wi-fi that held me — it was the atmosphere.

Is it so wrong to like the “third place?” I don’t think so. I’ve been working at home for weeks now, and damn, but it gets lonely there. People are social animals and we need to see other animals to feel we aren’t the only gazelle left on the savannah. Offices are the designated place to work, but the last one I had seemed almost designed to be depressing — windows waaaaay across the other side of the room, dust and grime on everything, a computer that crashed every half-hour, lousy coffee. My sightline was the back of my neighbor’s computer and a wall, with a filing cabinet against it. Above the filing cabinet, an American flag printed on a newspaper page, with “September 11, 2001” printed above. Believe me, if you worked there you’d find any excuse not to.

Hence the Third Place. Alan, in the midst of midwifing a breech-presenting series one year, would print copies of all the stories and take them to a nearby restaurant, where he’d blue-pencil the crap out of them in peace, away from his phone and the thousand stinging ants of the newsroom. Only anyone seeing him there — and perhaps some of his very own supervisors — would have said, “That guy is goofing off,” when in truth he got more done in the third place than he did in the office.

The Ann Arbor third-place scene is vibrant, to say the least. Starbucks and Espresso Royale windows are always full of laptop-open students, what looks like business meetings and other activities only tangentially related to coffee-drinking. Office managers should take note. Windows good. Coffee good. Comfy chairs even better. Third place: Good.

Some headlines just scream “read me.” HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, say, or FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.

And this one: SPANKY THE CLOWN ARRESTED ON PORN CHARGES.

It’s worth following the link just to see the picture.

Thanks, Connie.